#SpreadTheLove
What’s in a Colour?
Every minute of every day, we’re surrounded by colour. Everywhere we look, there’s a colour in there somewhere. In the hedgerows, the sky, on the frothy top of a cappuccino. Colour is so much a part of our existence, more often than not; we take it completely for granted! Think about a glorious summer’s day. Birds singing, bees buzzing… That blue sky up there is never just a blue sky. If you look, and we mean REALLY look, it’s actually one big mix up of blues, whites, indigos and various shades of all the above. From Electric to Ink to Ice to Snow to Champagne, and even sometimes a hint of Orchid, they’re all in there somewhere.
We at Disco Beads firmly believe that colour is the essence of life itself (and we’re not wrong, but more on that later!). We spend hours looking at colour, and it makes us all very happy.
If you’re reading this blog, we already know you’re big into your colours too, but do you really know what they all mean? Do you know why you like what you like? Do you know what your favourite colours say about you? Why one girlfriend loves a yellow, and the other is happier in green? Maybe there’s a colour out there you didn’t think you liked, when it could be just the one to bring out your inner Unicorn?!
It’s not just about what you wear either. What about décor?
The colours you choose for your home can have the same effect. Take orange, for example. Slap on some orange if you want to inject a room with happy fun-filled energy, but don’t expect it to do you any favours in a chillout space or office. Way too excitable! However, inject a little bit of orange into a white room, and boom. There’s your little energy spot right there!
Colours can help lift a mood, make a space feel great, inspire creativity, even make you feel like dancing. So, as we’re all colour crazy here at Disco Beads, we thought it would be brilliant to spread the love and talk about all things colour on our blog.
How about we start off with how colours work?
We’re going to get a little bit sciency for a minute here, but bear with us…
Did you know that how we see colour is something that happens in our brains, not in our eyes?? Basically everything we see is just reflected light!
You know when we said colour is the essence of life? Well here’s why:
Everything on our planet needs to absorb light to survive. Fact. The light itself is electromagnetic energy produced by the sun, and it travels in waves.
When those light waves bounce off objects, our eyes create a sensation that is perceived by our brain as a particular ‘frequency’, which then gives us what we call colour. The colour we see is determined by its frequency. A high frequency is perceived as blue, and a low one as red, and all the others are on a spectrum in between. Objects that appear to be dark absorb more light and reflect less light back at us, and so we see them as darker. Lighter objects reflect more light and therefore seem brighter. For example, when light hits a great big red painted vase, it absorbs all the other rays and only reflects back the red wavelengths, so we see the vase as red!
It’s these frequencies that lie behind the colours associated with the chakras. The higher frequency colours are violet (Crown), indigo (Brow), green (Heart) is in the middle, and the lower ones are yellow (Solar Plexis), orange (Sacral) and red (Root). But more on Chakras another time.
So now we know it’s the brain that does all the hard work allowing us to see all these beautiful colours around us, and that the ability to see them is down to the frequency and wavelength of the energy with which light travels, it makes complete sense that colours can have a massive impact on our lives in all sorts of ways.
So, here’s an idea: Next time you go out outside, particularly at this time of year with colour exploding everywhere, take a minute to have a good look at the whole spectrum of what’s going on, and imagine what it might be like without our magical brains making sense of it all. Black, white and grey, that’s what!
Lisa x
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